Name: Venngage
Quick Pitch: Easy-to-use online data visualization tools for creating infographics.
Genius Idea: Venngage provides a cheap and intuitive platform to help businesses create quality infographics without the expense of in-house designers.
Say goodbye to outsourcing infographics and worrying about the expense of in-house work.
Venngage, a Toronto-based firm, offers an affordable and simple platform for businesses to create quality infographics without the expense of in-house designers.
"We're designed for the end users," Venngage CMO Lucas Walker told Mashable. "We're made for those who gather the information and use it."
Venngage is an offshoot of Visualize.me, a startup that launched last year to help consumers transform the information on their LinkedIn profiles into infographic resumes. This new effort focuses more on business needs and broadens the scope of use cases for data visualization tools well beyond job hunting.
The service is ideal for small businesses and teams looking to package information in a more aesthetically pleasing way for investors. For example, if a startup needs investors to understand how traffic from social networks and external sites is influencing its growth, a good infographic can be key.
Tableau offers similar software, but it costs $999 for the Desktop Personal Edition and $1,999 for the Desktop Professional Edition. IBM also offers a similar service called Cognos Business Intelligence that starts at $500 and you must also download software.
What sets Venngage apart is its online-only platform that doesn't require any downloads. Users can login and begin creating infographics within seconds through a click-and-drag interface. Though ease of use is a major factor in Venngage's appeal to small businesses, the low cost of the service may be the bigger sell.
There are three account types that are available: Basic (which is free but contains a watermark on each graphic), Professional (for $20 a month per account, users can access API plugins to bit.ly Facebook and Google Analytics to enhance their visualizations) and Enterprise (which offers real-time analytics and custom algorithms for data gathering for a range of prices.)
Venngage's demo day is Oct. 23.
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